Cape Cod Journal 2007, Part 1
Cape Cod Journal 2007
Introduction: For me anyway—and I think also for my handful of readers--my Cape Cod Journal from last summer was one of the highlights of last year’s blog. In those notes, I wrote about going to beaches and eating lobster but also tried to grapple at least a bit with the question of how, or if, one can have an “authentic,” even “elemental,” experience in the face of all the processing and packaging that goes along, for most of us, with the word “vacation.” This year, I have returned to the beaches and the seafood, but haven’t done a heck of a lot of grappling. Instead, I have just taken it for granted that Cape Cod is a deeply interesting and amusing place to which we very much like to go. One complication this year—and a major reason that I’m blogging the journal so long after our return from vacation—is that I gotten bitten by a tick after hiking on the Cape and came down with Lyme disease, which meant a really nasty week or so of headache, fever, and chills. Now I’m taking antibiotics and feeling better, and I’m not going to write too much about the whole Lyme disease thing—but I will say that I’ll be using insect repellent the next time I head into the New England woods (strange that I had to go to Cape Cod to get infected since the eponymous town of Lyme is right here in Connecticut, just about 30 miles north of where I live).
Part 1
Friday 6/8/07
I head into this week’s vacation not quite sure that I have the same drive and energy to get some writing done that I had last year—but here I am at 9pm on the first evening sitting down at almost the same table to do a little jotting. By “almost the same” I mean that we are staying not only at the same resort but in the same building as last year, in a unit with a nearly identical layout, though we’re on the first floor instead of the second. Next year we’ll have to see if we can get second-floor unit again (the deck is better than the patio, and you get more privacy), but this place is still quite nice.
~
We have a sunny day for our drive today rather than a rainy one (like we had last year), but it’s supposed to rain tomorrow, just as it did on Saturday a year ago. And Ben and Lisa are schedule to visit for that rainy day once again—only this year Lisa is almost eight months pregnant!
~
We arrived in time to have dinner on the Cape this year, so we head to Oysters Too, quite nearby and recommended by the resort staff. We started with oysters on the half shell, which where very good, and I ordered the Seafood Fra Diavolo, a concoction that is nearly impossible for me to resist whenever it’s on the menu. My dish is spicily excellent, but Suz’s lobster, shrimp, and scallops over penne pasta is not as good. The lobster tail is tough, and the butter sauce is too rich. Nicholas is pretty happy, as usual, with pasta marinara, especially since the waitress grates fresh parmesan on it right at the table with a special little grinder. The only trouble is that he’s done with his pasta by the time Suzanne and I are through with appetizer and salad, so in order to buy time for us to finish our entrees I have to bribe Nicholas for the rest of dinner with lavishly buttered bits of bread (“No gaps!” he commands). As a rule, we can’t let Nicholas butter his own bread for the simple reason that he will, if unchecked, stick his finger directly in the butter and lick it. That is, if he doesn’t try to eat whole chunks of it straight. At one point tonight he says, “I want butter on bread with no bread!” and is quite delighted with his little joke.
~
This year we were able to leave Branford by 1 o’clock, instead of 2:30, and though we had all the usual sorts of last-minute details to sort out the departure was more mellow than last year’s too—and that’s progress. On the way out of town we stopped for a drive-thru Dunkin Donuts lunch of egg & cheese bagel sandwiches and one chocolate munchkin apiece. This is a favorite lunch for weekend day trips, and is really just about the only time we go to a fast food chain. As these things go, it’s not that bad for you, and it’s pretty tasty. The earlier departure means we miss the rush hour crunch at Providence and get here by 4pm, giving us time after dinner to hit Roche Brothers grocery store (already pre-approved from last year) to stock up for the week. We also go to a nice wine shop right next to Roche Bros., which was either mysteriously unnoticed or absent last year. Checking in to the resort earlier, I had noticed brochures for two different Cape wineries, so I ask the guy at store about them. I have been wondering if you can get away with taking a four year old to a vineyard, but the guy says it pretty much a “grown-ups only” scene. As for the wines, he says they are “interesting,” but difficult to compare to anything more familiar because of the distinctive soil and climate on the Cape. Instead of the vineyard route, he recommends going to in-store tastings like the ones he does from 4-7pm every Friday and Saturday. That leaves me only tomorrow as a possibility before we leave—we’ll see if I make it.
~
The Winnie the Pooh bed we used for the first time last year has been a great favorite on all our trips since then, but is nearly outgrown, since Nicholas is shooting up like a beanstalk these days. I see from last year’s journal that he was so excited the first night on the Cape that he didn’t get to sleep until 10 o’clock. This year he still seems restless when I check on him at 9:24, but by about 9:26 he’s down for the count—storing up energy for tomorrow!
Saturday 6/9/07
Cloudy, and it turns out that Ben and Lisa can’t come today since Lisa isn’t feeling so hot--for the usual advanced-pregnancy reasons. Nicholas is quite sad that he won’t be seeing Ben, but a trip to the resort’s indoor pool cheers him up considerably (he just had his first swim lessons this spring, so now he gets to try out his moves). We drive down to Wood’s Hole to visit the aquarium at the Oceanographic Institute (yet another of Thomas Jefferson’s inspirations it turns out), and the aquarium exhibit is small but very well curated. We see local fish like cod, salmon, and halibut that I’m used to seeing only down at our local fish shop, laid out on a bed of ice. Also a hermaphroditic lobster that is half red and half blue and a really big lobster that is all blue. Perusing these exhibits we learn about the phenomenon of “color morphs” in lobsters—something I had never heard of. It’s mostly a matter of genetic mutation, but lobsters can also turn blue if they don’t get enough shells in their diet. We see other cool stuff too, like those creepy Remora Suckers that like to ride on the backs of sharks. The only sharks, though, were little “dogfish,” but this display was fascinating to N. because you could see tiny fetal dogfish hanging about in egg sacs.
In a brilliant stroke, they let you walk around behind the tanks, so you can see the “working” side of the aquarium, with pipes and drains to circulate the water, etc. etc.
~
After the aquarium we head out of Wood’s Hole and along the coast toward Surf Ride Beach, but end up at a little unmarked beach with a small dirt parking lot (we followed a car turning down a likely looking road). This beach has a nice Charleston-like marsh alongside, with a little stream of warm water running through it. Nicholas sets up his water wheel, which—with a little help from our shovels—promptly carves out a small channel down through the soft, sandy bank and into the stream (the sand was fine and soft by the stream but coarse and rocky on the main beach). After a while, we get back in the car and drive a bit further down the road to what must be Surf Ride Beach (though we never saw a sign). There we act the part of “aquarium-keepers” with our nets and pails. Nicholas is determined that we’re going to gather some fish to keep in our aquarium/pail, but ultimately he settles for periwinkles plucked from the rocks of the jetty. We agree that we will study them tonight and make some notes, then release them back into “open water” tomorrow. Come to think of it, though, our aquarium is still in the back of the van as I write this.
~
We make our way back to Wood’s Hole for dinner, fully intending to try the Fishmonger’s Cafe. But we are ravenous by 5:15 and FC doesn’t open until 5:30, so we end up at Shucker’s for lobster boil, just like last year. Somehow it just isn’t as good this time. Part of the problem is that the lobster isn’t hot enough—but it may also have something to do with the fact that we didn’t get the Thursday Night Special price (as we did last year) and we didn’t stumble on the restaurant just as we got an unexpected late break of sun after a day of rain (like last year). Anway, the mussels are scraggly, the steamers are gritty (well, like they are most places), and the corn is pretty mediocre. All in all, it just isn’t the sort of experience that makes you go “Ahhh, lobster!” That leaves us with a goal to reach before the week is out.
Introduction: For me anyway—and I think also for my handful of readers--my Cape Cod Journal from last summer was one of the highlights of last year’s blog. In those notes, I wrote about going to beaches and eating lobster but also tried to grapple at least a bit with the question of how, or if, one can have an “authentic,” even “elemental,” experience in the face of all the processing and packaging that goes along, for most of us, with the word “vacation.” This year, I have returned to the beaches and the seafood, but haven’t done a heck of a lot of grappling. Instead, I have just taken it for granted that Cape Cod is a deeply interesting and amusing place to which we very much like to go. One complication this year—and a major reason that I’m blogging the journal so long after our return from vacation—is that I gotten bitten by a tick after hiking on the Cape and came down with Lyme disease, which meant a really nasty week or so of headache, fever, and chills. Now I’m taking antibiotics and feeling better, and I’m not going to write too much about the whole Lyme disease thing—but I will say that I’ll be using insect repellent the next time I head into the New England woods (strange that I had to go to Cape Cod to get infected since the eponymous town of Lyme is right here in Connecticut, just about 30 miles north of where I live).
Part 1
Friday 6/8/07
I head into this week’s vacation not quite sure that I have the same drive and energy to get some writing done that I had last year—but here I am at 9pm on the first evening sitting down at almost the same table to do a little jotting. By “almost the same” I mean that we are staying not only at the same resort but in the same building as last year, in a unit with a nearly identical layout, though we’re on the first floor instead of the second. Next year we’ll have to see if we can get second-floor unit again (the deck is better than the patio, and you get more privacy), but this place is still quite nice.
~
We have a sunny day for our drive today rather than a rainy one (like we had last year), but it’s supposed to rain tomorrow, just as it did on Saturday a year ago. And Ben and Lisa are schedule to visit for that rainy day once again—only this year Lisa is almost eight months pregnant!
~
We arrived in time to have dinner on the Cape this year, so we head to Oysters Too, quite nearby and recommended by the resort staff. We started with oysters on the half shell, which where very good, and I ordered the Seafood Fra Diavolo, a concoction that is nearly impossible for me to resist whenever it’s on the menu. My dish is spicily excellent, but Suz’s lobster, shrimp, and scallops over penne pasta is not as good. The lobster tail is tough, and the butter sauce is too rich. Nicholas is pretty happy, as usual, with pasta marinara, especially since the waitress grates fresh parmesan on it right at the table with a special little grinder. The only trouble is that he’s done with his pasta by the time Suzanne and I are through with appetizer and salad, so in order to buy time for us to finish our entrees I have to bribe Nicholas for the rest of dinner with lavishly buttered bits of bread (“No gaps!” he commands). As a rule, we can’t let Nicholas butter his own bread for the simple reason that he will, if unchecked, stick his finger directly in the butter and lick it. That is, if he doesn’t try to eat whole chunks of it straight. At one point tonight he says, “I want butter on bread with no bread!” and is quite delighted with his little joke.
~
This year we were able to leave Branford by 1 o’clock, instead of 2:30, and though we had all the usual sorts of last-minute details to sort out the departure was more mellow than last year’s too—and that’s progress. On the way out of town we stopped for a drive-thru Dunkin Donuts lunch of egg & cheese bagel sandwiches and one chocolate munchkin apiece. This is a favorite lunch for weekend day trips, and is really just about the only time we go to a fast food chain. As these things go, it’s not that bad for you, and it’s pretty tasty. The earlier departure means we miss the rush hour crunch at Providence and get here by 4pm, giving us time after dinner to hit Roche Brothers grocery store (already pre-approved from last year) to stock up for the week. We also go to a nice wine shop right next to Roche Bros., which was either mysteriously unnoticed or absent last year. Checking in to the resort earlier, I had noticed brochures for two different Cape wineries, so I ask the guy at store about them. I have been wondering if you can get away with taking a four year old to a vineyard, but the guy says it pretty much a “grown-ups only” scene. As for the wines, he says they are “interesting,” but difficult to compare to anything more familiar because of the distinctive soil and climate on the Cape. Instead of the vineyard route, he recommends going to in-store tastings like the ones he does from 4-7pm every Friday and Saturday. That leaves me only tomorrow as a possibility before we leave—we’ll see if I make it.
~
The Winnie the Pooh bed we used for the first time last year has been a great favorite on all our trips since then, but is nearly outgrown, since Nicholas is shooting up like a beanstalk these days. I see from last year’s journal that he was so excited the first night on the Cape that he didn’t get to sleep until 10 o’clock. This year he still seems restless when I check on him at 9:24, but by about 9:26 he’s down for the count—storing up energy for tomorrow!
Saturday 6/9/07
Cloudy, and it turns out that Ben and Lisa can’t come today since Lisa isn’t feeling so hot--for the usual advanced-pregnancy reasons. Nicholas is quite sad that he won’t be seeing Ben, but a trip to the resort’s indoor pool cheers him up considerably (he just had his first swim lessons this spring, so now he gets to try out his moves). We drive down to Wood’s Hole to visit the aquarium at the Oceanographic Institute (yet another of Thomas Jefferson’s inspirations it turns out), and the aquarium exhibit is small but very well curated. We see local fish like cod, salmon, and halibut that I’m used to seeing only down at our local fish shop, laid out on a bed of ice. Also a hermaphroditic lobster that is half red and half blue and a really big lobster that is all blue. Perusing these exhibits we learn about the phenomenon of “color morphs” in lobsters—something I had never heard of. It’s mostly a matter of genetic mutation, but lobsters can also turn blue if they don’t get enough shells in their diet. We see other cool stuff too, like those creepy Remora Suckers that like to ride on the backs of sharks. The only sharks, though, were little “dogfish,” but this display was fascinating to N. because you could see tiny fetal dogfish hanging about in egg sacs.
In a brilliant stroke, they let you walk around behind the tanks, so you can see the “working” side of the aquarium, with pipes and drains to circulate the water, etc. etc.
~
After the aquarium we head out of Wood’s Hole and along the coast toward Surf Ride Beach, but end up at a little unmarked beach with a small dirt parking lot (we followed a car turning down a likely looking road). This beach has a nice Charleston-like marsh alongside, with a little stream of warm water running through it. Nicholas sets up his water wheel, which—with a little help from our shovels—promptly carves out a small channel down through the soft, sandy bank and into the stream (the sand was fine and soft by the stream but coarse and rocky on the main beach). After a while, we get back in the car and drive a bit further down the road to what must be Surf Ride Beach (though we never saw a sign). There we act the part of “aquarium-keepers” with our nets and pails. Nicholas is determined that we’re going to gather some fish to keep in our aquarium/pail, but ultimately he settles for periwinkles plucked from the rocks of the jetty. We agree that we will study them tonight and make some notes, then release them back into “open water” tomorrow. Come to think of it, though, our aquarium is still in the back of the van as I write this.
~
We make our way back to Wood’s Hole for dinner, fully intending to try the Fishmonger’s Cafe. But we are ravenous by 5:15 and FC doesn’t open until 5:30, so we end up at Shucker’s for lobster boil, just like last year. Somehow it just isn’t as good this time. Part of the problem is that the lobster isn’t hot enough—but it may also have something to do with the fact that we didn’t get the Thursday Night Special price (as we did last year) and we didn’t stumble on the restaurant just as we got an unexpected late break of sun after a day of rain (like last year). Anway, the mussels are scraggly, the steamers are gritty (well, like they are most places), and the corn is pretty mediocre. All in all, it just isn’t the sort of experience that makes you go “Ahhh, lobster!” That leaves us with a goal to reach before the week is out.
posted by Steve Shoemaker at 7:06 PM
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